for America.”
I say it as a joke, but by the time you turn away the painting resembles nothing so much as a black scour on the gallery wall. Compared to the others, it positively screams with intention.
You cap the spray can with a clack that rebounds through the galleries like every door closing. “Just meet me by the Egyptian thing when you’re done,” you say, and disappear, a tinge of resentment in your wake, for questioning your radicalism—the temple to Osiris, relocated from other shores via freighter to the museum’s northern wing in the 1960s, has been a place of solace since we started coming here in daylight hours, when most of it was still encased in glass. The stone is now so thick with graffiti that it gives the entire monument a greenish cast, but there’s something comforting in the fact that it’s still standing, that despite best efforts no one has been able to take it down.
I walk through just the emergency lights like an ill-defined spirit of vengeance across beds of shattered glass. I pass a decapitated statue of Sakhmet, its head resting three feet away, one ear missing. Deeper within the museum crouches East Asia, Oceania, their pedestals empty, artifacts spewed across borders. I pause at each unmarked painting and object, unsure of how to proceed, as if totality had been something we intended when we arrived here, when I recognized the cross-streets and pulled the cord on the bus, saw the butt of a metal pipe against porcelain and knew finally where I was, as if this wasn’t ultimately the perfect example of just using the items we suddenly had in our hands.
By the time we leave the magnificent cavern, our heads are filled with paint fumes, outbursts of black.
*
The second-to-last phone call I received—on the bus, as we crawled across Pennsylvania toward the city, numbed now to the changing landscape—was from a high school friend I hadn’t talked to in three years, who told me that another mutual friend, close-knit into our group during school but, again, whom I hadn’t spoken with in years, had died unexpectedly, at twenty-one. The circumstances were mysterious and difficult for my friend to corroborate: he’d seen him the previous night, they’d hung out for a few hours drinking, went to a restaurant, and then parted ways and gone home (they were both on summer break from school). That morning, the morning we left Indiana, the mother of the mutual friend had gone up to check on him, but his bedroom door was locked. Eventually, they’d broken in and found him dead inside. There was speculation that he’d accidentally or purposefully mixed some kind of pills with the alcohol, my friend said, but they weren’t sure. People (he listed names) were gathering in Dayton for the funeral tomorrow, in case I wanted to be there.
I turned and told you what happened, about this friend who was dead (who I don’t think I’d mentioned before), and about the friend who called to give me the news (likewise). I left it dangling at the end, the hint of proposition: “The funeral is tomorrow.” You burrowed your head into my shoulder but didn’t say anything, silently refusing to enter—I realize now—the trap that I’d created, that I would blame you for setting when Casey died a month later. How much grief, it seemed to imply, could I reasonably be expected to exhibit for someone I’d never mentioned caring about, who didn’t exist between us until this moment? How deep and true could you expect this to go?
The last phone call came two hours after that, when you were asleep, the scenery in the window unspecified, probably still Pennsylvania, and was from another high school friend, with whom I’d communicated even less recently. He said my first name, then my first and last name, to confirm who he was talking to. He asked if I’d heard about Nik, who had died this morning. I told him that I’d just heard. He was less sure than my other friend, more audibly broken up. They still weren’t sure. People were gathering in Dayton for the funeral. I filed the losses.
The peripheral world gets smaller.
Let’s pretend we’re walking home.
South again, you mount one of the stone lions outside the library. “What do you think it takes to bring one of these beasts to life?” You wiggle your hips.
“Probably a little more than you can give it,” I say. “Probably nothing short of divine intervention or a lightning strike on an eclipse night.”
You resolve to try anyways. You begin to grind back and forth on its back, grabbing the mane for leverage. I look side to side, embarrassed, as if someone will catch us in the act, but the street is deserted, almost seems to mock my concern. “What are you doing?”
Keeping the rhythm costs whatever breath you’d otherwise use to answer. You set your jaw and close your eyes, like this routine takes every ounce of your concentration. The scene is baroquely pornographic, as if we’d walked onto a tidily composed set on which we were supposed to play out the fantasy of some unknown director, where I’m the audience, and standing there beneath the streetlights and security cameras and around it capitalism and maybe somewhere above that the moonlight, tasting residual blood, watching your thighs tense—imagining, as anyone would, the lion as some beastly stand-in—I think, yet again, of the broken vase, glazed with an invisible layer of our dried sweat and oils, degrading it by degrees. I’d brought up your brother again once, obliquely. After we’d had the vase for a few days, when it had settled into the arrangement of the room, I drew my finger across the pattern of lotuses connected to cherry blossoms etc, etc and said, “It reminds me of something I’ve seen before—does it for you? Remind you?” The question was phrased in a way that made it incomprehensible. The only aspects of your brother I remembered were the tattoo and the fact of his death; I couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup in long sleeves.
You answered, “I mean, it reminds me of Japan,” which, fair enough, was what I’d replied to essentially the same question when we first brought it back, and that was all we said. Already a tacit understanding had formed, an unspoken agreement on what we would and would not acknowledge, a kind of commitment to choosing silence over dialogue.
By now you’re straddling the lion’s neck, totally spent, your hands splayed over the molded mane. You look up, panting, and brush the hair off your forehead. It takes you a minute to catch your breath, and then, saying nothing, you slide off the statue—I have the briefest image of your fingers untangling from long hairs—leaving a glistening streak down its side. You walk lightly, in a wider stance for a minute, then seem to forget. I wait for a breeze to clear the evidence, to crystallize this into an anecdote you’d once have shared among our circle of friends while I sat beside you, envied and silent, the chosen accomplice. The eyes stare out like statues do.
*
Three blocks later, we cross a high-end chain drugstore, recently shut down, its windows freshly blacked-out. We break in at my suggestion, a demonstration of our volition. The alarms go off immediately; in this neighborhood we still only have a few minutes before the cops arrive. You grab the back of my shirt and we stumble forward in the dark, as in the cellar—the only light comes from the jagged hole in the lower half of the sliding door. “Oh, John, let’s live here,” you say.
The shelves are still variously stocked; they haven’t had a chance to come in and clear it all out yet, to distribute the remainders to other branches or ship it off to a landfill. “Okay…” your voice comes from behind me. “So, what exactly can we take?”
“Anything that fits in your mouth.”
You dash off in the direction of the beauty aisle, while I lurch uncertainly toward the nonperishable foods in the back, for no particular reason except that they’re the most recognizable in the dark. I paw the shelves blindly, not really trying to accumulate but enjoying the feeling of knocking items to the ground, as if I’m some larger and more basic creature. After a minute I shout through the alarms, toward the general sound of your presence, “What’re you finding?”
“Cosmetics!”
